The Connectives

6. “Or”

Chapter 6 “Or” He’s making a list, He’s checking it twice; He’s gonna find out Who’s naughty or nice. Santa Claus is Coming to Town (traditional Christmas song)§6.1 DISTINCTIONS AMONG DISJUNCTIONS 6.11 Introduction Before beginning with an introduction proper, giving a brief overview of this section and of the rest of the chapter, we offer, by way of an hors d’oeuvres – an “Or” d’oeuvres, we might say – a glimpse at a problem besetting studies of this most intriguing of the sentence connectives, the word or. The problem is that it is often not clear when a feature of the usage of this word constitutes a genuine datum for a semantic account to accommodate, and when it represents a confusion on the part of speakers (and writers) – a semantic (rather than syntactic) ‘performance error’. On p.216f. of Banfield [1982] in a discussion of the expectation that a literary text will be consistent, we read: Examples are easily found of inconsistencies, which are, however, judged unacceptable by readers. Heintz [1979] points to one from Tolstoy: “according to Anthony Savile, a careful reading of Anna Karenina reveals that it begins on a Monday or a Tuesday. Since nothing in the novel turns on this inconsistency, critics treat this as a slip on the author’s part and they do not treat the world of Anna Karenina as inconsistent on that account” (p. 92). One can hardly avoid reacting to this passage in the following terms. So what, if according to the story, the action begins on a Monday or a Tuesday? That’s not inconsistent by any stretch of the imagination: the date of the action is underdetermined rather than overdetermined. Indeed, even if the story is quite clear that the action begins on a Monday – so that there is no underdetermination on this score after all – a report that according to the story it begins 767 768 CHAPTER 6. “OR” on a Monday or a Tuesday would still seem correct (though less informative than it might usefully be). What is meant by the remark attributed to Heintz is presumably something along the following lines: according to (some parts of) the story, the action begins on a Monday, while according to (other parts of) the story, the (same) action begins on a Tuesday. This would actually be what is predicted by one theory of how the word “or” functions: to mark a wide scope conjunction, which was just expressed using “while” in place of “and” for purely stylistic reasons. (We will see versions of this theory advocated by E. Stenius and R. Jennings in 6.14 and the appendix to this section.) Unfortunately the theory delivers a reading for the sentence about Anna Karenina which that sentence surely does not have – though the theory does have the interesting merit of explaining why Banfield should have written it. If one looks at p.92 of Heintz [1979] (to which there is a footnote crediting the inconsistency observation to Anthony Savile, in discussion) one finds, not very surprisingly perhaps, that Banfield has misquoted Heintz at the crucial point: “a Monday or a Tuesday” should be “a Monday and a Tuesday”! The question remains of course as to why Banfield did not notice that she had mistranscribed Heintz’s remarks: presumably she thought that the whole thing made good sense with “or”. It is as an explanation of how that might have come about that the ‘wide-scope and’ suggestion, which works very well for a good many otherwise puzzling occurrences of or, may do some work. (A more mundane explanation is possible, too: unconscious interference from the title, “Monday or Tuesday,” of a 1921 Virginia Woolf prose poem.) Another area in which performance errors in semantics are apt to arise is that in which there are several scope-bearing elements, and conspicuously when among these are negation and modal auxiliaries. An example from the transcript of a radio interview (the details of which are given in the end-of-section notes: p. 816) is the following remark from the interviewee: Well, surely in terms of resistance exercise, you know, one can start by walking up stairs just to increase the strength of the thighs, some gardening where you’re lifting, pulling, pushing, shoving, all of those activities have a sufficient resistant component that that’s going to begin to you know increase strength. One can then begin to do...